–Innovation:Joel Mokyr asks whether technological progress is a thing of the past. “Has technological progress slowed down? Have we really picked all the low-hanging fruit? This column argues that technological progress is in fact not a thing of the past. Far from it. There are myriad reasons why the future should bring more technological progress than ever before – perhaps the most important being that technological innovation itself creates questions and problems that need to be fixed through further technological progress. If we rethink how innovation happens, we have every reason to suspect that we ain’t seen nothing yet.”

–Syria and Oil:James Hamiltom breaks down the effect Syria is having on the oil market. “The growing likelihood of U.S. military action in Syria seems to be one factor in the recent sharp rise in oil prices. That is not because Syria itself is an important producer of oil. According to the EIA, the country was producing less than 370,000 barrels a day in 2010, only half a percent of the world total. Civil unrest and an embargo had brought that down to 71,000 barrels this May, less than 1/10 of 1% of global supplies. If that goes too, nobody but the Syrians will miss it. But the question is whether conflict would be neatly contained within Syria. The situation in Egypt, for example, remains quite unstable, and it would not take much to set it off again. Egypt is also a relatively minor contributor to world production. But the Suez Canal and Sumed pipeline together transport 3.5 million barrels of crude petroleum and refined petroleum products through Egypt each day, a number that would correspond to 4.6% of total world field production of crude oil.”

–Changing Expectations:Richard Crump, Stefano Eusepi and Emanuel Moench of the NY Fed look at how expectations changed ahead of the June Fed meeting. “Following the June 18-19 Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting different measures of short-term interest rates increased notably. In the chart below, we plot two such measures: the two-year Treasury yield and the one-year overnight indexed swap (OIS) forward rate, one year in the future. The vertical line indicates the final day of the June FOMC meeting. To what extent did this rise in rates following the June FOMC meeting reflect a shift in the expected future path of the federal funds rate (FFR)? Market participants and policy makers often directly read the expected path from financial market data such as the OIS contracts. In this post, we take an alternative approach by looking at surveys of professional forecasters to assess how expectations changed.”

About Real Time Economics

Real Time Economics offers exclusive news, analysis and commentary on the U.S. and global economy, central bank policy and economics. Send news items, comments and questions to the editors and reporters below or email realtimeeconomics@wsj.com.